Kidz pt 2

Bob Black:
There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories [and schools] came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors; he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work?

Hot air breathing dragon

Prick:

Duncan Bannatyne has taken issue with Pakistan-born James Caan's non-domiciled resident tax status and it has now led the fiery Scot to issue an ultimatum to his fellow Dragons – he will not invest alongside any Dragon that does the show using offshore companies.

Trust the BBC to find the leftie entrepreneurs.
I wonder how he feels about the bailouts? You know, the biggest robberies in world history, by an order of magnitude? I have a feeling he might be OK with them.

Cult ethic

Arbeit macht frei:

We are so close to the world of work that we can't see what it does to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a time in our own past when the "work ethic" would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriately be labelled a cult.

This relates to my previous post about the ancient intertwining of the parasites: religion and politics. Without these, civilisation as we know it would never have come about. Were they inevitable? Unlikely - it seems they were more like a disease that spread from the Middle East.
Peter Drucker, who loves Calvinism and "management" - admitted that it was not certain that management was a good thing, or productive, or whatever. Well it isn't - the best "management" like "best government" is hands off. Which begs the question - why is it there at all? Because of organised violence, that's why. Giant protection rackets, all over the globe, born of politics and religion. The Invisible Boot.
There is no hope for a civilization which starts each day to the sound of an alarm clock.

Adolescence is a man made problem

Peter Drucker:

PT: All right. I believe you. You'd put off graduate school?

Drucker: I'd put off elementary school if I had my way. I am not a great believer in school. School is primarily an institution for the perpetuation of adolescence.

PT: If you don't believe in school, how would you educate?

Drucker: That is an entirely different question. The thought that school educates is not one I have accepted yet. No, I am not joking.

PT: I know you are not joking.

Drucker: No, I would be much happier if kids at age 17 were young adults among adults. Those who wanted to go back to school could come back later. They would be better students and much happier people. But I don't control the universe. In the university we expect everybody to sit on his butt through the full natural life-span of man-which is about 25. All I can say is, Thank God I am not young. I could not survive this horror. The only thing my secondary school faculty and I were in total agreement on was that I sat too long and did not belong in school. In this we were in total agreement. Otherwise, we had few points of contact. Adolescence is a man made problem. It is not a stage of nature.

Politics is the second oldest profession

Celente on form, as always.

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear

A quick word about the meme that you hear more and more of these days as justification for tearing down freedom:
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear from these security measures.
It's a ubiquitous, insidious idea, and has been used to defend everything that's flushing the Western world down the toilet. My local publican said it when policemen came on a random patrol into his pub on a Friday and scared away half his punters. It's what they say about ID cards. It's what they said about airport scanners.
Here's the thing.
It's a false dichotomy. Hide/fear, or Nothing to hide/nothing to fear, is not exhaustive. It takes as a given that intrusion is logically inevitable. It's not, hence it makes the logical fallacy of petitio principii, or begging the question. That is, there are other scenarios out there. Some of my favourites: innocent until proven guilty, privacy rights, mutual respect, you're our servants not our masters, and leave us alone you fucking cunts.

Ministry of Health

Welcome to our world, USA:

Of 4,670 haemophiliacs, over 2,000 had died as a direct result of being given infected imported blood in what Lord Winston described as the ‘greatest tragedy in the history of the NHS’. Those who are calling for a public inquiry into Staffordshire might care to reflect on the ineffectual outcome of the inquiry which did result from that tragedy.

Friday 5th February, arch Twit of the Government Whips Office, Kerry McCarthy was sent toddling down to the chamber to lodge a formal objection to the Bill being passed without debate.
[The Government] said ‘No’ to an official Government Inquiry, ‘No’ to giving oral evidence to the Archer Inquiry, ‘No’ to implementing the Archer Report in full, ‘No’ to a Commons debate on the Archer Report, ‘No’ to supporting the Contaminated Blood Bill and now it is saying ‘No’ to giving MPs time to even debate the Bill!

Game, set, and match to the Government. 25 years of campaigning hit a brick wall.

There's a response in the comments that could hardly be bettered:

Dear Ms Raccoon,

Thank you for your enquiry.

You appear to be under some misapprehensions about the purpose of the NHS. You believe that it’s supposed to cure people, or something. Things have moved on since that philosophy was in operation, many decades ago. No, these days, the new thinking is that the real purpose of the NHS is to kill people, in as large as numbers as possible.

Let me explain. In the past, people were understood to have become ill as a result of bacterial or viral infection, largely through no fault of their own. But now we know that most disease is caused by ‘lifestyle’ factors. Smoking cigarettes, for example, causes all forms of lung disease, every kind of cancer (and not just lung cancer), all variants of heart disease, and more or less every other disease as well. And if cigarettes don’t cause these diseases, then drinking alcohol does so instead. Or eating meat. Or not getting enough exercise. And these lifestyles are what people have freely chosen to adopt. And so, it’s their own fault if they contract these diseases. And given there’s next to nothing that the NHS can do to cure them, the only option is to assist them to a premature death, which is where they were all heading anyway.

In modern NHS hospitals, doctors all know that anyone who has been wheeled through the front door is someone who has been trying to kill themselves all their lives with smoking, drinking, overeating, sex, lack of exercise, and so on. We simply try our best to help them on their way to the early grave they quite obviously seek.

I agree we’re not very efficient about it. MRSA is a nasty way to die. We’re hoping that new legislation on assisted suicide will allow us to open some assisted suicide facilities in our hospitals. Some people call them ‘gas chambers’, but these have some unfortunate resonances, and so we’re looking for another name for them. But, once the new facilities come online, we’re hoping to boost the NHS deathrate from its current figure of about 70,000 a year to something more like 1,000,000 a year. Patients with ‘lifestyle’ diseases will be able to look forward to rapid and immediate treatment in these new facilities, with waiting times of only minutes or hours.

We will, of course, retain the treatment centres for the old-style bacterial and virally-transmitted diseases. So if you get malaria, we’ll still prescribe drugs for its treatment. However, there is a strong argument that even malaria is a ‘lifestyle’ disease. You get it by going to West Africa. And anyone who gets malaria has only themselves to blame, and must have had a death wish of some sort, which we at the NHS will be more than happy to fulfil.

I’m sure you’ll agree that the new model NHS will be far more efficient than the old one. Hospitals will be much smaller. Wards will be small and very private. Patients will be treated immediately. Much of the old bureaucracy will vanish. Furthermore, the health of the remaining population of Britain will be greatly improved as unhealthy people are removed, and the population of Britain will fall towards sustainable levels. We’re hoping to bring the population down to 5 million or so by the end of the century.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me again if you have any further questions.

Yours faithfully,

Josef Mengele, M.D.

The revolution is not being televised

It's worth watching Zeitgeist for a number of reasons. Whether you accept all of it or not, it will make you think. It's like the previously-touted Fall of the Republic, perhaps even better.
It's made up of 3 separate parts. Part 1 details the rise of religion, and is eye-opening. Part 2 is a kind of Loose Change thing, casting doubts on the official 9/11 story. But it's more convincing than Loose Change because it omits some of the more sloppy elements of said film, and doesn't bombard you with statements. Part 3 concerns the Fed.
When you take the 3 parts together, there is scope for tying them together in some way. For example, it could have explained how the elite evolved, as a kind of parasitic class that used superstition (at first), then religion, via all sorts of symbols, as a form of control.

Angus Laundrettes

It was on one of my regular strolls through the West End of London that I yet again considered the conundrum that is the Aberdeen & Angus Steak House chain. It's a series of restaurants taking up prime real estate that is yet so bad that Jay Rayner, the restaurant critic of The Observer, has described it as having “the mass appeal of herpes but none of the laughs”.
Indeed, it is almost laughably bad, even looking in from the outside. Tacky, red, and empty.
If this doesn't say money-laundering, I don't know what does. I mean, the biggest lies are always dangled right in front of people noses. Even the KFC at Leicester Square has closed down. Yet the ASHes remain.
Did a little research on this, but didn't find much, just this:

The man behind the 23-strong chain, one Ali Shah, failed to respond to interview requests (he is notoriously media shy). One restaurant expert argued that the chain survived by catering for undiscriminating tourists (which didn't explain the apparent paucity of customers), while another suggested that it was all down to a cheap long-term deal on the premises (for which he had no proof).

In 2003 it was then reported that they had gone into administration. But then:

A Google search subsequently revealed that not only was the Aberdeen and Angus Steak House back - with fresh online reviews from customers complaining about everything from the use of tinned mushrooms to waiters clearing tables before meals had finished - but had been so for five years!

The startling development seems to have been covered by only two publications, one of which was The Estates Gazette, which explained in April 2003 that “a newly created private firm controlled by Noble Organisation, a Gateshead-based amusement arcade operator, had cherry-picked the most prominent Central London sites in the Aberdeen Steak House chain”.

Newly-created private firm? You don't say?

I hit the phones, although it quickly became evident that the Noble Organisation, a family firm best known for owning the Brighton Pier, would make Ali Shah seem as shy as Russell Brand. I rang one of the restaurants and was informed by an Eastern European voice that he was forbidden to give out the head office phone number. Another restaurant gave a contact number, but it was connected to a fax.

I left a message for David Biesterfield on his voicemail and he called back several hours later.

“Do you handle the Aberdeen and Angus Steak House?”

“Yes.”

“How's business?”

“We are upgrading and refurbishing the restaurants.”

“Great. I'm interested in writing about the brand for The Times. Could you give me an idea how it manages to survive, given the - erm - obvious challenges?"

“We're not ready to talk just yet about that particular business.”

And that was the end of the conversation.

So let me get this straight. No attempt at publicising or marketing, no explanation, the most extraordinary secrecy. Does it sound like a free market operation? Or corporatocracy? I'd like to think that it's "honest" money laundering, ie a genuinely private company avoiding the government's theft. But it's too big, too blatant, and has all the usual signs of corporatism.
Naturally there's a deafening silence from the media, and even the reporter above ends with a glib, lame "joke", intended to undermine everything she just said:

But it was when I put the phone down and once again began to wonder whether I should extend my research into paying the firm a visit as a diner that I had a revelation. The Aberdeen and Angus Steak House's longevity is surely due to the low-level but perpetual trade of journalists, all trying to work out how on earth it survives. Think about it. It's the only possible explanation.

Of course, if she had said it's a fraud, an accounting shell, and come up with evidence, she may have ultimately lost her job.

Why the US is finished pt 3

Last Sunday the USA effectively socialised about one-fifth of their economy. Here's Peter Schiff ripping the idea to shreds. By the way, it's not exactly surprising that, since Americans are now more unhealthy than at any other time, the government wants a piece of the healthcare action.

We have nothing to lose but our fun

Just read another interview with the incomparable Doug Casey, about "fun."
Now this is a matter which is perhaps closest to my heart, and I think really encapsulates everything else that is going on in the new world order of things.
Alcohol, tobacco, firearms, sex, drugs, rock n roll. Are there any more glorious six terms in the world? It's pretty much the antithesis of Celente's Harvard, Princeton, Yale, bullets, bombs, banks.
It is these things that make life worth living, along with food. And yet they are regulated, taxed, "educated" against, banned or otherwise pushed underground.
It's a big subject, and I admit it's making me angry just writing this. But I'd like to start with smoking.
Because I suspect that it is not bad for your health. And I know for sure that it should not be banned anywhere.

L: What would you say to people who don't want to breathe other people's smoke? Isn't it a violation of their rights when a smoker fills the air with fumes they don't want to breathe?

Doug: It might be, but it might not. It's a matter of property rights. If someone comes into your house and blows smoke in your face, that certainly is a violation of your rights. But if you're in a restaurant or airplane and the owners are okay with smoking, no one is violating your rights. You have the right to leave or fly another airline, but you don't have a right to impose your personal air quality standards on others, in their places. In these types of situations, it's not the smoke that's the problem, it's unclear property rights.

And I like what he says a bit before that:

It seems like all these chimpanzees get a new meme in their heads, and that becomes the new way it is. Fashion totally overrules principle.

So the smoking ban is a way of pushing bar and pub owners around, and generally undermining freedom, like They do, with a pseudo-scientific idea backing it up, that it's bad for you, and bad for those around you.

Ah yes, the science. Now, I'm reluctant to get into this, because even if they released mustard gas the government would have no business banning them. In fact, if they released mustard gas the government would be making a killing selling them to the CIA and the Taliban. They have no business banning anything.

But I'm becoming more and more aware of a gap in any persuasive evidence that smoking causes lung cancer, or any illness. Diet and food, yes. Smoking? Show me the evidence. Given that we spent 100,000 years in the palaeolithic era sucking up cooking fire fumes, and that the most successful of our ancestors did this most often, I have a hard time with a few lit sticks being a big deal.

There is a caveat to this. I suspect that because of the intervention of government with their regulations and so on into the tobacco industry, it has created large conglomerates (discussed here) and perverse incentives which have decreased the quality of the cigarettes. They add ammonia and god knows what else, in order to get tobacco into the blood stream quicker, and make them burn faster. This is why I smoke roll-ups.

Anyway, there's a great online book by Lauren Colby which is worth a read, and contains a few gems:

There is an Internet News Group devoted to smoking (alt.smokers). Recently, a participant called the Office of Smoking or Health, in an effort to find out how the government arrives at its estimate of 450,000 annual smoking related deaths. After repeated calls to different individuals within the government, it turned out that nobody really knew how the figures are compiled.

Quite frankly, I do not know whether there is a risk to smoking, or not. I do know that "risk" is not the same as causation. Philosophers, from Plato to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, have been fascinated with the word "cause", and have written many learned treatises on the subject. My great grandfather was working on a bridge construction site in 1927, when a careless driver jostled him. My great-grandfather became startled, lost his balance, and fell through a hole in the bridge. Not being able to swim, he drowned in the river below. Was the cause of death (a) drowning; or (b) the actions of the careless driver; or (c) the loss of balance; or (d) the existence of the hole in the bridge flooring; or (e) not being able to swim?

In this book, I have shown that the case for a smoking/lung cancer connection is by no means proven. Certainly, there is no case whatever for a connection between ETS (second hand smoke) and any disease, nor is there are any case for a connection between cigar and pipe smoking and lung cancer. The case for a connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer rests on the slim reed of a science called epidemiology. But all epidemiological studies, predicated as they are on statistics, are subject to so many co-factors and confounding factors as to be subject to innumerable different interpretations.

You may want to refer to this page also, which refers to sources that indicate smoking may alleviate or help prevent Parkinson's, TB, skin cancer, breast cancers, Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, and others. I'm not saying these claims are "right" either, just that they are hypotheses just as valid as "smoking is bad for you."

A word on that last hypothesis. As Karl Popper has said, a good hypothesis is one that can be falsified. The above hypothesis has been falsified. Take a look at the list of the ten longest-lived people ever, in the world. The top two smoked for most of their lives. And if more information was available (I don't have time to research them all) you would probably find that 5 or 6 of the others also did.

So this falsifies the theory that smoking is bad for you. Well, some may say that they would have lived longer than that if they had not smoked. But that doesn't really wash, does it? We've had billions of attempts at creating long-lived people, and these are the best we've come up with. End of story.

I wouldn't mind if it were just commonly wrongly assumed that cigarettes were bad for you - because they would then have more of an edgy, sexy image, and that would benefit me. But it's that Big Government thing again, sucking all reason to live from our bones. And, scarily, it's happening all over the world.

WA-wah

For all those who think that the housing boom was caused by a "shortage of housing":

With boom times returning to WA, the housing market is once again overheating. The median house price in Perth is now $512,000, according to the December quarter figures from Australian Property Monitors, putting it beyond the reach of any new homeowner without substantial savings or parental support.

It is not difficult to pinpoint the cause of this price escalation.

During the second half of last year, new lots approved for building in Perth and Peel were running at an annual rate of under 9000. This is extraordinarily low. Even in the mid 2000s, when supply was being far outpaced by demand, annual new lot releases were running at more than 15,000.

The reasons for this were shown to lie squarely with the Government's land-starvation policy. The Government just won't allow enough blocks to be developed for housing, thereby preventing competition from driving down prices.

This has stemmed from unfounded fears of the high cost of providing new infrastructure, a mania for central planning and groundless opposition to urban sprawl in a State that has more natural bush and farmland than anywhere else in the world.

Government resistance to allowing land to be used for housing has also been abetted by ministerial dreams of creating a compact city with teeming inner suburbs populated by bohemian theatregoers and by downright contempt for new-homebuyers' preference for McMansions on individual lots.

OK, so we have Western Australia. The most remote least populated area on earth, barring the two poles. All that land, just waiting to be put to use.
But they're not allowed.
So yes, there is a shortage of houses. And no doubt, the government might spin that and say, look, we're going to build a bunch of new houses! In urban areas, so we can all be bohos! But, as with the Credit Crunch and every other damn thing, they were the cause of the problem in the first place. They created a shortage of houses. And they will make it worse with their so-called fixes.

State jobbies

More brilliance from the Daily Mash:

THE majority of the UK workforce do not really know what they are supposed to be doing while they are at the office, according to new research.

The Institute for Studies found that 64% of employees turn up and sit at a computer and then stay there until it feels like it is okay to leave.

Roy Hobbs, a person who turns up most days from Hatfield, said: "I think I'm supposed to be head of, I dunno, some personnel bullshit thing.

"Or maybe team leader, or assistant product supervisor. Fuck knows. To be honest, I can't remember what it said on the advert.

"A couple of years ago I filled in some form, told the normal amount of lies during a 30 minute interview, they said something about pensions and then I went for a couple of pints."

He added: "I get a lot of emails from someone called Tony who goes on about purchasing or something and sometimes asks me about my kids. I forward them to someone called Ian. Or I ignore them.

"Otherwise I just type the names of random dangerous animals into Google. I think it's going well."

Ah, non-jobs. Kind of reminds me of North Korea. That's nice, isn't it?

Socialist surrealism

Just came across an excerpt from one of Dalrymple's books, which reminds me why I read the guy. Some of his stories are way out there. But none more so than this one, recounting a time when, more or less by accident, he managed to join up with a group of British communists on its way to the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students in North Korea in 1989:

I went several times during the festival to Pyongyang Department Store Number 1. This is in the very centre of the city. Its shelves and counters were groaning with locally produced goods, piled into impressive pyramids or in fan-like displays, perfectly arranged, throughout the several floors of the building. On the ground floor was a wide variety of tinned foods, hardware and alcoholic drinks, including a strong Korean liqueur with a whole snake pickled or marinated in the bottle, presumably as an aphrodisiac. Everything glittered with perfection, the tidiness was remarkable.
It didn't take long to discover that this was no ordinary department store. It was filled with thousands of people, going up and down the escalators, standing at the corners, going in and out of the front entrance in a constant stream both ways - yet nothing was being bought or sold. I checked this by standing at the entrance for half an hour. The people coming out were carrying no more than the people entering. Their shopping bags contained as much, or as little, when they left as when they entered. In some cases, I recognised people coming out as those who had gone in a few minutes before, only to see them re-entering the store almost immediately. And I watched a hardware counter for fifteen minutes. There were perhaps twenty people standing at it; there were two assistants behind the counter, but they paid no attention to the 'customers'. The latter and the assistants stared past each other in a straight line, neither moving nor speaking.
Eventually, they grew uncomfortably aware that they were under my observation. They began to shuffle their feet and wriggle, as if my regard pinned them like live insects to a board. The assistants too became restless and began to wonder what to do in these unforeseen circumstances. They decided that there was nothing for it but to distribute something under the eyes of this inquisitive foreigner. And so, all of a sudden, they started to hand out plastic wash bowls to the twenty 'customers', who took them (without any pretence of payment). Was it their good luck, then? Had they received something for nothing? No, their problems had just begun. What were they to do with their plastic wash bowls? (All of them were brown incidentally, for the assistants did not have sufficient initiative to distribute a variety of goods to give verisimilitude to the performance, not even to the extent of giving out differently coloured bowls.)
They milled around the counter in a bewildered fashion, clutching their bowls in one hand as if they were hats they had just doffed in the presence of a master. Some took them to the counter opposite to hand them in; some just waited until I had gone away. I would have taken a photograph, but I remembered just in time that these people were not participating in this charade from choice, that they were victims, and that - despite their expressionless faces and lack of animation - they were men with chajusong, that is to say creativity and consciousness, and to have photographed them would only have added to their degradation. I left the hardware counter, but returned briefly a little later: the same people were standing at it, sans brown plastic bowls, which were neatly re-piled on the shelf.
I also followed a few people around at random, as discreetly as I could. Some were occupied in ceaselessly going up and down the escalators; others wandered from counter to counter, spending a few minutes at each before moving on. They did not inspect the merchandise; they moved as listlessly as illiterates might, condemned to spend the day among the shelves of a library. I did not know whether to laugh or explode with anger or weep. But I knew I was seeing one of the most extraordinary sights of the twentieth century.
I decided to buy something - a fountain pen. I went to the counter where pens were displayed like the fan of a peacock's tail. They were no more for sale than the Eiffel Tower. As I handed over my money, a crowd gathered round, for once showing signs of animation. I knew, of course, that I could not be refused: if I were, the game would be given away completely. And so the crowd watched goggle-eyed and disbelieving as this astonishing transaction took place: I gave the assistant a piece of paper and she gave me a pen.
The pen, as it transpired, was of the very worst quality. Its rubber for the ink was so thin that it would have perished immediately on contact with ink. The metal plunger was already rusted; the plastic casing was so brittle that the slightest pressure cracked it. And the box in which it came was of absorbent cardboard, through whose fibres the ink of the printing ran like capillaries on the cheeks of a drunk.
At just before four o'clock, on two occasions, I witnessed the payment of the shoppers. An enormous queue formed at the cosmetics and toiletries counter and there everyone, man and woman, received the same little palette of rouge, despite the great variety of goods on display. Many of them walked away somewhat bemused, examining the rouge uncomprehendingly. At another counter I saw a similar queue receiving a pair of socks, all brown like the plastic bowls. The socks, however, were for keeps. After payment, a new shift of Potemkin shoppers arrived.
... But this is no joke, and the humiliation it visits upon the people who take part in it, far from being a drawback, is an essential benefit to the power; for slaves who must participate in their own enslavement by signalling to others the happiness of their condition are so humiliated that they are unlikely to rebel.

Comedy and tragedy. Creepy, poignant, and incendiary. Brings to mind 1984, but also Dawn of the Dead.
Slavery is deeply entrenched in people, it seems. To submit to this horror is surely worse than death.
But then so many of us in the western world do much the same - that is a pointless, strenuous, going-though-the-motion type "occupation", for our own little palette of rouge.

hey...

this is written by a libertarian ludic libertine hedonist, individualist, primal foodie, atheist, apolitical, Darwinian amateur philosopher. Standing, as are we all, on the brink of the Greatest Depression. I think the following ideas currently floating around like malignant parasitic insects, ubiquitous and iniquitous, need re-examination or outright extermination:

Democracy
Vaccines
“Too big to fail”s
Religion & “belief”
Environmentalism
The BBC
Marriage as a deal for men
Corporatism
Vegetarianism
Prohibition of drugs
Discipline & sacrifice
Zero sum views of the world
“Rights”
Common Fisheries Policy
“Hope”
Agriculture
Myth that fat is bad for you
Credentialism
Economics
“Teams” & teamwork

And they're all related. For now the first thing I’ll link to, to set the tone, is this exhilarating paradigm-busting essay on why work should be abolished.